Joanna lives at St Albans Community and is sharing her thoughts and feelings during the lockdown period.
18th April 2020
How are you? I’m ok today. I try to take one day at a time and every day is a new day. I have been in lockdown in my house for about four and a half weeks now, but because I am registered as a critically vulnerable person,
I haven’t been allowed to go on any walks outside of my house – although I’m lucky that I have quite a big back garden to spend time in – which is lovely when the sun is shining and I also I do my daily exercises there with Ali, which is good fun. We use the Joe Wicks exercise class on Youtube every morning. It takes 20 mins and we do 20 exercises with 30 seconds rest in between each exercise.
I must admit that it hasn’t been easy during lockdown for me. It wasn’t too bad at first as I could socialise with my house friends but after about 2 weeks the lockdown got stricter because I am a lot more vulnerable than my house friends and socialising has been very different.
I have to do social distancing with everyone including all our support workers. I have to have nearly all my meals on my own and to have most meals in my bedroom or to prepare them on my own, although sometimes I can eat them in the back garden if no one else is around. I know and appreciate that everyone is worried for me and want to keep me as safe as possible, which is great, but this situation really doesn’t help my mental health at all and I have become quite angry or extremely tearful at times or even both at the same time. But now there has been some changes in the house situation it has got a lot easier for all of us and we can have good social distance conversations outside and across the upstairs hallway together, which is lovely.
Although times are tough for everyone, we are as a household, are fortunate that we – as friends- live with each other and have a roof over our heads. We also have a garden and I do have a variety of activities that I can occupy my time within my room too.
I have also written a song about myself and it has been put onto the CVT Connect website! Extremely exciting!!! Plus social distance talking with house friends is great!
Another amazing and wonderful thing that happened five and a half days ago is that my sister and her fiance’s baby was born!! It’s such a brilliant thing to have happened and the whole family are so thrilled for them all!! We did a family Whatsapp video session on Tuesday which was really special. We are all sad not to be able to see their little daughter in reality for the first time but we all know we will definitely celebrate big time when we can!!
Well I’ve said all I can think of saying for the moment, but I may write some more at a later date.
Thank you to all of our support workers who are doing amazing jobs to keep us all safe and well.
Bye for now
Joanna
